WaveMaker has just been acquired by VMware. This partnership is the result of discussions that have been going on between WaveMaker and the SpringSource division of VMware for more than a year.

I have always had great respect for how Rod Johnson revitalized and simplified the Java market with the Spring framework and developer projects. When we started development of WaveMaker over three years ago, we chose Spring as our foundation.

WaveMaker is based on the Spring framework but targets a different audience: non-expert developers looking for the easiest way to build web apps.

It turns out that this is a very large market. According to Gartner, only 20% of IT staff have expert app development skills - WaveMaker is the tool to enable the other 80% of IT to build web apps quickly and deploy them to the cloud with a single mouse click.

As WaveMaker went from 3,000 downloads a month in January, 2010 to 135,000 downloads a month in December, 2010, we realized that we had created the perfect "on ramp" for cloud computing. WaveMaker can play a big role in bringing large numbers of developers to the cloud, but only if we team with the right cloud partner.

With VMware and SpringSource, we have found that partner!

The good news here is that VMware will continue to support and provide services to the WaveMaker customers, via the same team that provided it before.